Event-related potential (ERP) studies claim that affective and cognitive empathy differentially modulate ERPs evoked by painful stimuli such that affective empathy influences early frontocentral components (N1, N2) and cognitive empathy affects later centroparietal components (P3, LPP). However, existing studies only use one empathy task and thus tap into only one construct. We used a within-subjects design in which participants viewed body parts experiencing painful and neutral stimulation followed by faces making congruent painful and neutral expressions. Participants (N = 100) completed four different tasks in response to the stimuli, rating their own discomfort (Affective Sharing), their concern for the target (Empathic Concern), how much pain they thought the target felt (affective Perspective-Taking), and the masculinity/femininity of the target (Control). Data-driven mass univariate analyses were used to analyze all electrodes and epoch timepoints separately for the body part and face stimuli. In contrast to previous findings, affective sharing and cognitive empathy tasks did not differ during early ERP components. For body parts, the effect of pain (painful vs. neutral stimuli) elicited widespread amplitude differences between empathy and control tasks from 200–650 ms, including the N2, P3 and LPP components, with no difference between empathy tasks. For faces, effects of pain started on the N170 and were weaker and more temporally restricted for the perspective-taking task, disappearing after 420 ms while empathic concern and affective sharing tasks elicited activity until 650 ms. We discuss these results and their implications for theories of empathy, emotion, and affective priming.
Mentalization, the ability to interpret the mental states of others, is a central component of Theory of Mind (ToM). The medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) has been consistently implicated in mentalization, but the neural oscillations that support this process are not fully understood. Theta oscillations are a candidate mechanism, because they have been linked to social-cognitive processing and may coordinate information processing through coupling with faster gamma activity. In the present sham-controlled, within-subjects study, we investigated whether mentalizing performance can be modulated using either conventional theta transcranial alternating current stimulation (tACS) or cross-frequency theta-gamma tACS over the mPFC. Thirty-four participants completed a mentalization task during theta, theta-gamma, and sham stimulation. Decision time and accuracy were assessed for affective and cognitive judgments. Theta stimulation slowed decision times compared with sham and theta-gamma stimulation, whereas theta-gamma stimulation did not differ from sham. Theta stimulation slowed both affective and cognitive judgments, with the effect being more pronounced for cognitive judgments. Accuracy was unaffected by stimulation. The observed slowing suggests that theta stimulation may have increased the weighting of competing social information, resulting in slower affective and cognitive judgments rather than improved performance. Together, these findings indicate that mPFC theta oscillations may influence the speed of mentalizing judgments.
Savoring is a positive emotion up-regulation strategy that increases positive emotion and the late positive potential (LPP) in response to positive pictures. Knowing whether savoring affects response to subsequently presented negative pictures might increase understanding of whether it could buttress against the impact of upcoming negative events. Nonetheless, a beneficial effect of savoring on subsequent negative emotion might run counter to attempts to maintain negative emotion that are employed by individuals high in chronic worry. We investigated whether savoring of positive pictures would alter electrocortical and self-report responses to subsequently presented negative and neutral pictures, and whether individual differences in worry would moderate this effect. On each trial, participants (N = 36) savored or viewed a positive picture, which was followed by a negative or neutral picture. Participants were asked to simply view the second picture and rate its emotional valence while EEG was recorded. Results showed that savoring positive pictures led to reduced LPPs to negative but not neutral pictures. However, this effect was attenuated for those higher in worry, such that individuals with higher levels of worry showed larger LPPs to negative pictures after savoring (versus viewing), whereas those with lower levels of worry had smaller LPPs to negative pictures after savoring. Savoring did not affect self-reported pleasantness ratings to negative pictures, and worry did not modulate savoring of positive pictures. Therefore, savoring may reduce the processing of upcoming negative pictures but may backfire for individuals higher in worry, potentially because emotional shifts are perceived as threatening.
Working hard to pursue our dreams should get us there sooner or later. However, no matter how hard we try, sometimes, things are simply beyond our control, and our efforts may even be detrimental. Swiftly adapting our efforts to the controllability of the environment is a critical skill that is impaired in many neuropsychiatric disorders. Yet, how exactly we calibrate our efforts to the controllability and the richness of the environment (i.e., the overall amount of reward available in the current context) remains largely unexplored. We developed the novel Controllability and Mental Effort Task (CoMET) to investigate how varying controllability and reward context impact the motivation to exert effort for reward (n = 61). Importantly, we tested the impact of controllability while controlling for average reward rate. As hypothesized, participants were more willing to exert effort in controllable environments than in uncontrollable ones and adjusted their decisions to exert effort dynamically as a function of varying controllability. Their willingness to exert effort was also sensitive to the reward context: in reward-poor contexts, participants engaged in more effort when the momentary reward was high. Drift Diffusion modeling of decisions to exert effort showed that controllability, high momentary reward, and low effort enhanced the value integration process with increased drift rates, and controllability specifically increased decision threshold. Interestingly, individuals with higher subclinical depression traits were more sensitive to controllability, showing diminished motivation, particularly in an uncontrollable high-reward context. Taken together, these results indicate that people dynamically track multiple environmental features and integrate them into their effort allocation strategies.
Loneliness is associated with altered social cognition and decision-making, yet the processes through which it shapes behavior in uncertain social contexts remain poorly understood. In particular, little is known about how loneliness relates to metacognitive evaluations of decision reliability. The present study examined whether loneliness is associated with differences in decision confidence and its calibration to uncertainty during social decision-making. Data were collected from two independent general population samples (N = 6,517) using a vignette-based task in which participants decided to engage in or avoid social interactions and rated their confidence. Across both samples, higher loneliness was associated with lower overall decision confidence. Critically, loneliness moderated the relationship between decision difficulty and confidence such that individuals reporting higher loneliness showed reduced sensitivity of confidence to increasing difficulty, indicating diminished calibration to uncertainty across diverse social decision contexts. In contrast, loneliness was not associated with differential confidence between engagement and avoidance decisions. These findings were robust after adjusting for demographic variables and symptoms of depression and anxiety. The results suggest that loneliness is linked to altered metacognitive evaluation rather than biases in decision outcomes, highlighting impaired confidence calibration as a potential mechanism underlying persistent loneliness and maladaptive social functioning.
Stability, mental stability in particular, is necessary for adaptive functioning. Dynamical systems existing in a changing environment must adapt to it by resolving the dialectical tension between stability and flexibility, which is captured in the concept of resilience. Allostasis is considered as a systemic mechanism of resilience and has recently been framed in terms of active inference, a theory of sentient behavior. Allostatic systems are thought to operate on the principle of self-organized criticality, which is related to free energy minimization, the central tenet of active inference theory. Based on this framework, I propose a functional brain hierarchy that supports allostasis. In it, desire and affect, framed in terms of affective inference, serve to integrate and mediate mutual constraints between cognitive and physiological homeostases. I further suggest that as allostatic organisms evolve into affective ones, they develop into conative agents, whose conation regulates their affective dynamics. At the top of this regulatory hierarchy, I propose raw desire, a domain-general global desire for positive affect (or to simply feel better). This functional hierarchy makes the raw desire-affective charge regulatory loop a core mechanism of allostasis and mental stability. It also implies an inherent vulnerability of conative organisms to affective dysregulation. Accordingly, much of psychopathology may be considered as compromised conative inference, which could be a target for therapeutic intervention.
The present study examined how social competition modulates motor response execution and inhibition using behavioral, signal-detection, and event-related potential measures. Forty-three participants completed a Go/NoGo (GNG) task under social-competition and control conditions while EEG was recorded. Relative to control, social competition shortened Go-trial reaction times (RTs) without reducing accuracy, and greater RT speeding was associated with larger increases in the rated importance of response speed. Competition also increased NoGo commission errors, reflecting reduced Go/NoGo discriminability (lower d′) and a more liberal response criterion (C). Neurally, NoGo trials elicited larger N2 and P3 amplitudes than Go trials, whereas competition enhanced both Go-P3 and NoGo-P3 amplitudes without reliably modulating the N2. Go-P3 amplitude, maximal over centro-parietal/parietal sites, was negatively associated with Go RTs in the control condition. Competition-related increases in Go-P3 amplitude were associated with greater Go-RT speeding and statistically mediated the effect of competition on Go RTs, suggesting greater engagement of an stimulus–response (S-R) mapping process that translates task-relevant stimulus features into the appropriate Go-response representation. NoGo-P3 amplitude, maximal over frontocentral/central sites, was not significantly associated with commission errors or d′ in the control condition. However, competition-related increases in NoGo-P3 amplitude were associated with increased commission errors and reduced d′ and statistically mediated both effects. This pattern suggests that enhanced NoGo-P3 amplitude reflects increased demands for reactive control under a heightened prepotent Go tendency. Overall, social competition preferentially modulated P3-indexed, time-resolved control processes during motor response execution and inhibition, facilitating faster but still accurate motor response execution while impairing response withholding.
Anxiety has been linked to mode-specific dysregulation in cognitive control, characterized by reduced proactive maintenance and heightened reliance on reactive engagement. Yet many neuromodulation studies implicitly assume a unitary enhancement of control. We tested whether acute transcutaneous auricular vagus nerve stimulation (taVNS) produces global or context-dependent changes in cognitive control. Thirty-one individuals with generalized anxiety disorder completed a within-subject, single-blind, counterbalanced study comparing active and sham taVNS across two sessions. Participants performed the AX Continuous Performance Task, which dissociates proactive and reactive control demands. Conventional behavioral indices, including reaction time, accuracy, d′-context, and proactive behavioral indices, did not show reliable stimulation-specific changes. Hierarchical drift diffusion modeling further suggested that stimulation-related effects were subtle and uncertain. A modest directional pattern emerged for boundary separation in AY trials, where active taVNS appeared to preserve decision caution relative to a sham-related decline; however, the 95
Cognitive reappraisal is an effective emotion regulation strategy that involves changing the meaning of an emotional event to alter one’s emotional experience. Experimental studies have identified two dissociable subprocesses within reappraisal: the generation of candidate reappraisals (reappraisal generation) and the elaboration on a reappraisal to change emotion (reappraisal implementation). We examined the shared and unique neural correlates of these two reappraisal subprocesses. Participants (N = 45) completed the validated GenImp task while fMRI BOLD data was collected. In this task, participants viewed emotional images and, in separate steps, generated possible reappraisals and then implemented those reappraisals to feel better. Both generation and implementation engaged executive and semantic networks, while generation preferentially recruited ventral semantic pathways supporting conceptual analysis and flexible meaning construction. In contrast, implementation involved greater engagement of dorsal and self-referential regions supporting attentional control, elaboration, and emotional modulation, accompanied by stronger Executive Control Network – Default Mode Network (DMN) anticorrelation and DMN suppression. Together, these findings highlight a functional shift during reappraisal, starting with flexible semantic construction (generation), and then to top-down regulatory control (implementation), illuminating how executive, semantic, and self-referential systems dynamically interact to achieve successful emotion regulation in cognitive reappraisal.
Sociometer theory proposes that self-esteem reflects a global index of perceived relational value, whereas experiences of acceptance and rejection may be integrated more proximally through specific self-evaluation. Yet it remains unclear how perceived relational states themselves are associated with the neural processing of domain-specific self-evaluation. The present study focused on morality and competence-two central domains of self-evaluation that may be differentially linked to social acceptance and rejection. We examined the neural correlates of domain-specific self-evaluation in relation to perceived relational states in 45 Japanese adults (19 males). Participants assessed the extent to which trait adjectives described themselves or a celebrity during fMRI scanning and completed questionnaires assessing their sense of acceptance and sense of rejection. Results showed that sense of acceptance was negatively associated with medial prefrontal cortex activity during general self-evaluation and positively associated with putamen activation during evaluation of positive (vs. negative) self-traits. Sense of rejection was positively associated with temporal pole activation during competence (vs. moral) self-evaluation. No significant neural associations were observed for self-esteem. These findings suggest that perceived acceptance and rejection are associated with domain-general and domain-specific neural processes during self-evaluation. These findings imply that perceived relational states may be reflected in neural processes through which social information is incorporated into self-related processing.
Although the self-positivity bias (SPB) suggests a preferential association with positive valence, emerging evidence indicates a more robust self-interaction with negativity. We propose self-negativity repulsion (SNR)-an active avoidance mechanism-as a distinct process complementing SPB. Using a novel nonsemantic paradigm, we examined the bidirectional influence between self-relevance (self, stranger, none) and emotional valence (positive, negative, neutral) across two tasks: one assessing emotional valence's impact on self-processing (Social Task), the other vice versa (Emotional Task). Analyses of behavioral (RTs) and electrophysiological data (ERPs, MVPC) revealed a dissociation. Positive valence yielded no behavioral benefits but showed subtle neural facilitation (e.g., enhanced decoding, distinct connectivity), suggesting a processing saturation effect. Conversely, negative valence consistently impaired behavior (slower RTs, reduced SPE). This was accompanied by a two-stage neural pattern: initial vigilance (a larger P2) followed by late-stage processing disruption (a reduced LPP). These findings provide converging evidence for dissociable SPB and SNR mechanisms. We suggest a dual-component model where SPB facilitates early processing and integration of positive self-information, while a distinct SNR mechanism actively modulates or inhibits negative self-information.
Habits are central to daily life but remain difficult to study in the lab. Outcome Devaluation is often considered a “gold standard” paradigm for habit measurement; yet human studies have produced mixed evidence: many fail to show the overtraining effects on devaluation sensitivity expected from a robust habit index. An alternative measure involves remapping stimuli to new responses rather than devaluing outcomes. Crucially, this procedure limits preparation time to reveal habits that may otherwise be masked by goal-directed processes. Although promising, it remains unclear whether these tasks assess the same behavioural phenomenon. To address this, we compared Outcome Devaluation and Response Remapping under matched preparation-time constraints after 6 days of training. Response Remapping showed the expected pattern: expression of the pretrained (putatively “habitual”) response was greatest at 200–500 ms and weakened as preparation time increased. In Outcome Devaluation, raw responses to devalued outcomes increased with preparation time, driven by a time-dependent withholding bias. Once controlled for, devalued responses decreased with preparation time. Crucially, this effect was larger in Remapping. Moreover, task comprehension problems may limit interpretation of the Devaluation task. These findings suggest that paradigms engage partially distinct processes—response inhibition versus automatic action selection—with one requiring inhibition of a learned response and the other relying on fast, automatic actions. Our findings reveal that behaviour on these tasks is sensitive to task structure, underscore the need to consider distinct cognitive and motivational factors driving action selection, and highlight that what researchers call “habits” is influenced by multiple processes.
Sleep plays a crucial role in memory consolidation, particularly for complex, hippocampal-dependent tasks, such as associating faces with names. While numerous studies have examined the impact of sleep on memory, the specific effects on episodic face recognition, perceptual face processing, and the underlying neural mechanisms remain unclear. Thus study was designed to systematically evaluate the role of sleep in face recognition memory, learning, and consolidation in humans. A systematic search of PubMed, Google Scholar, Embase, Scopus, and Web of Science identified English-language, peer-reviewed studies published up to February 5, 2026. The authors independently screened articles, extracted data, and cross-verified results. The review adhered to PRISMA guidelines to maintain methodological rigor and transparency. Across 19 included studies, overnight sleep, post-learning sleep, and targeted naps showed the strongest benefits for face-related learning and memory, particularly in associative and hippocampal-dependent tasks, such as face–name and face–face memory. Slow-wave sleep/N3 and targeted memory reactivation were associated with improved cued face–name recall, while REM sleep and sleep spindles appeared to contribute to implicit face priming, emotional face memory, and adaptive face-learning processes. Sleep deprivation and sleep restriction generally impaired face-memory performance, particularly when tasks required episodic retrieval, associative binding, emotional discrimination, or sustained cognitive control. In contrast, simpler face-recognition or familiarity-based tasks showed weaker and less consistent sleep-related effects, often suggesting protection against forgetting or interference rather than robust memory enhancement. Sleep mainly benefits face learning when tasks require binding, episodic retrieval, emotional processing, or consolidation, while simple familiarity recognition shows weaker effects.
Humans form selective and enduring pair bonds with romantic partners, a principal feature of human sociality. Neuroimaging studies have shown that romantic partners are differentially represented from other individuals in the nucleus accumbens (NAcc) and anterior insula (aINS) and that the specificity of partner representations in the NAcc diminishes as relationships mature. However, it remains unclear whether such differentiation reflects partner-specific coding or mere differences in familiarity with others and whether these regions play different roles in romantic bonding. To address these questions, we applied multiple regression representational similarity analysis to fMRI data from 51 heterosexual male participants in early romantic relationships. The data were acquired during a social incentive delay task, in which participants anticipated social approval from their female romantic partner, a female friend, or an unfamiliar female individual. This approach allowed us to dissociate partner-specific representations from familiarity-related effects in the NAcc and aINS. We found that both regions exhibited partner-specific representations that could not be explained by familiarity. Consistent with previous findings, partner specificity in the NAcc was negatively associated with relationship duration, indicating that partner-specific coding in this region is established early in romantic relationships and diminishes as relationships progress. Moreover, greater partner specificity in the aINS was associated with more frequent intrusive thoughts about the partner. Together, these findings demonstrate that romantic partners are represented in the NAcc and aINS in a qualitatively distinct manner from other individuals, and that these regions support dissociable aspects of romantic bonding.
The predictive processing theory proposes that minimization of prediction error is a governing principle of perception, learning, and behavior, yet few studies have directly tested this hypothesis in time perception. We operationalized prediction error minimization as updating of an internal temporal reference and examined whether reference updating follows the direction required to reduce systematic prediction error. Across two experiments, 60 university students (Experiment 1) and 359 adults from a broader age range (Experiment 2) performed a temporal generalization task. Reference updating was assessed from changes in distributional asymmetry and peak shifts of temporal generalization gradients. This dissociated reference updating from possible perceptual bias that would alter gradient steepness without shifting the peak. In Experiment 1, frequent presentation of longer or shorter durations produced expected directional shifts of the internal temporal reference. In Experiment 2, consistent directional shifts emerged only when prediction error was sufficiently large, whereas smaller prediction error failed to induce reliable shifts. Together, these findings demonstrate that internal temporal reference updating in sub-second range time perception depends on the direction and magnitude of prediction error, providing a direct behavioral test of the prediction error minimization hypothesis.
Reward and motivation are two processes that drive goal-directed behaviors and are closely linked to the development of psychopathology. One behavioral measure of motivation is effort expenditure-the amount of effort exerted to attain a desirable outcome. In adults, higher effort expenditure has been associated with heightened neural responses to reward cues but diminished responses to reward anticipation and feedback. However, it is unclear whether similar patterns exist in early adolescence, a critical period for the development of reward- and motivation-related processes. Applying event-related potentials to a novel Effort-Doors task, we explored the effort-reward relationship in a community sample of 92 10-to-13-year-olds (53 females, mean/SD of age = 12.06/1.2 years). Behaviorally, youths were slower to respond in high-effort trials; they were also more likely to switch their choices following higher effort and reward losses in previous trials. At the neural level, greater effort expenditure increased youths' attention to reward cues (indexed by a larger cue-P3) and decreased the overall value associated with the reward trial (indexed by a smaller RewP). Effort did not influence feedback-elicited P3 or the late positive potential (LPP). Our work provided important preliminary evidence on the distinct effects of effort on different stages of reward processing in early adolescents. Future work is needed to better understand the underlying mechanisms of effort-based reward processes, their development across adolescence, and how they relate to behavior.
Object-location memory (OLM) is the ability to encode and retrieve spatial relationships between objects by using egocentric or allocentric reference frames. Critically, OLM is modulated by emotional memory systems that engage amygdala-hippocampal and arousal-related mechanisms that can bias or disrupt spatial encoding. Despite evidence that emotion shapes memory, its specific impact on OLM remains unclear, particularly in digital contexts. This systematic review examined how emotional valence, particularly stress and anxiety, modulates OLM performance in computer-based and virtual/augmented reality tasks. Following PRISMA guidelines, a systematic search was conducted in Web of Science, Scopus, PsycInfo, and PubMed. Twelve empirical studies published up to 2025 met the inclusion criteria. Results revealed sex-specific effects: anxious women tended to rely on egocentric strategies, whereas stressed men showed greater allocentric flexibility. The timing of stress exposure was critical, often disrupting encoding but occasionally facilitating retrieval. Emotional valence differentially influenced performance: positive stimuli enhanced spatial accuracy, whereas negative stimuli accelerated response times. Spatial working memory (SWM) and mental rotation emerged as key cognitive resources supporting flexible spatial learning, while physiological stress markers showed only weak associations with behavioral outcomes. Future research should standardize paradigms, explore digital and immersive environments, include diverse populations, and clarify theoretical distinctions among arousal, valence, anxiety, and stress to better understand how emotional states shape spatial memory.
Racial discrimination functions as a chronic psychosocial stressor that underlies racial trauma and elevates risk for mental disorders among racialized individuals. Emerging neuroimaging research has identified associations between experiences of racial discrimination and alterations in brain structure and function. However, the limited number of studies among racialized individuals constitutes a major gap in the scientific literature, leading to critical deficiencies in scientific knowledge, clinical practice, and informed public health strategies. This narrative review synthesizes findings from 19 neuroimaging studies examining the associations between experiences of racial discrimination and brain structure and function among racialized individuals across the lifespan. Neuroimaging studies have revealed consistent alterations in neural circuits involved in emotion regulation, threat detection, cognitive control, and self-referential processing among Black and other racialized individuals with experiences of racial discrimination. Notably, experiences of racial discrimination are associated with increased salience network connectivity (e.g., amygdala-insula), reduced prefrontal connectivity, decreased white matter integrity, and cortical thinning in regions, such as the cingulate cortex and hippocampus. These neural alterations are linked to heightened vigilance, emotion dysregulation, and higher risk for mental and physical health problems. This review highlights the limitations of previous studies along with providing future research directions. Recent neuroimaging studies on racial discrimination reveal key methodological limitations, including reliance on cross-sectional designs, limited sample diversity, small sample sizes, and inadequate intersectional analyses. Future research should employ longitudinal, multimodal approaches with larger, more diverse samples to elucidate causal pathways and protective factors underlying racism-related neurobiological outcomes.
Substantial evidence suggests that the late positive potential (LPP) indexes motivated attention to salient stimuli. However, traditional measurement of the LPP via mean amplitude may not fully capture rapid attentional dynamics. A nascent line of work has sought to remediate this limitation by measuring the LPP slope (i.e., rate of amplitude change); yet its functional significance and sensitivity to direct experimental manipulation lacks validation. To address this gap, we re-analyzed data from a fully within-subject crossover experiment (N = 29), where attention was manipulated using focused attention (FA) and open monitoring (OM) mindfulness inductions, contrasted against an active control condition, during an affective picture viewing task involving negative and neutral images. As hypothesized, the FA induction produced flatter, more positive slopes across both negative and neutral images, suggesting enhanced attentional stability. Intriguingly, the OM induction selectively produced flatter slopes on negative but not neutral image trials, aligning with prior postulations that OM may reduce reactive disengagement from aversive stimuli. Collectively, these findings demonstrate that LPP slopes are sensitive to direct manipulations of attentional control, providing much needed experimental evidence for their utility as a neural marker of attention dynamics.
Small animal phobia (SAP) is an anxiety disorder characterized by an intense fear triggered by small animals. Existing studies on SAP have primarily used univariate analyses and small, unbalanced samples, leading to inconsistent findings. Many brain structures have been proposed as potential candidates for encoding SAP, including the amygdala, the orbitofrontal cortex, the insula, the cingulate gyrus, the hippocampus, the precuneus, and the putamen. However, no previous study has systematically compared the predictive role of each of these regions to determine which one provides the most accurate classification of individuals with SAP. To address this question, we tested the predictive power of these brain regions associated with SAP. Structural MRI images of 32 individuals with SAP and 90 matched healthy controls were analyzed by using multiple Binary Support Vector Machines (BSVM). Our results showed that the most critical regions for classifying SAP, in order of significance, were the orbitofrontal cortex (balanced accuracy = 80.83
